The Minefield of the Nude

In early July all my thoughts centred around Modigliani whose work was being shown in London. I got every review on the exhibition I could find in the papers or on line. I also re-read my many books on Modigliani. As you know, Modigliani had been one of my all time hero's since the age of 16. Quite apart from his dramatic debauched life - his love of poetry and philosophy - I had loved his art. I had only seen a handful of his paintings in various galleries around the world - but never a major retrospective. However, those individual paintings I had seen were scared on my memory and thrilled me with their beauty, colour, rich paint and elegance. So I was shocked by the dismissal of his art by most critics, who called his work weak, over stylized, and pornographic. His nudes - which I found truly beautiful and not at all sexual, came in for the greatest amount of criticism. Yes his nudes were smouldering erotic - yes they seem to have had a sleepy post-coital sensuality - but I didn't see them as exploitative or abusive. I felt they were poems to love in paint made by a man who loved women and who women loved. But it seemed that the greatest crime Modigliani committed in an age of modernist innovation was to retain a love for the old masters, and the figure in a century when many artists escaped into abstraction and conceptualism.

As I thought about it I was struck by how often I had read vicious reviews of artists who painted the nude - for example Picasso, Schiele, and Freud. And many of these vicious reviews did not just come from reactionary Feminists (in fact women on the whole in my experience were far more comfortable with the nude and the sexual than men and it was no coincidence that many of the greatest writers on the nude, the erotic and even the pornographic had been women.) 


The fact of the matter was - the nude in art was a minefield! I could count on one hand the number of critics who had openly acknowledged the sexiness of a nude. In fact, the nude, the erotic and the pornographic were subjects of intense disgust for most art critics. Remember in many ways the critic was more of a politician and social mover than an artist. They sought respect and power through their 'refined taste and judgment.' So much of what they wrote was political not personal. The last thing they want was to let people know their dirty little sexual peccadilloes. The artist on the other hand - if they were great artists - exposed to the world their inner soul. It might so happen that their inner soul was perverted, or cruel or misogynist - but that's the risk the artist took. It was not a risk the critic ever made. The nude and the sexual should in theory have been subjects that brought people together in celebration of the human, but in fact the opposite was the case. Quite apart from the major criticisms of the nude - misogyny, abuse of power, voyeurism, the male gaze, the objectification of the female or male body, homophobia, perversion - there were other many subtle criticisms centred around what was considered - beautiful, uplifting, or just plain normal. 


In a sense, this should not be surprising, because the human subject provoked human interpretations. Depending upon the viewer almost any reading was possible of a nude. This was what made the nude quite the most difficult of subjects. Because as humans, we know human body's far more intimately that any other subject moreover we have far more intellectual and emotional responses to the nude that we simply could not summon for a picture of a landscape or a still-life. The nude even in photography, was never just a neutral subject and the part of the artist was never just artistic. Every artist brought different feelings to bear on the subject. Often peoples disgust with a nude was not about the nude - but how it had been seen an interpreted by the artist. 


The beauty of the history of art was the sheer variety of interpretations of the nude - both male and female. Starting with the beautiful fat Venus of Wilendorf - which could be read as misogynistic and cruel, or fantastic and celebratory of women. The pencil-thin nudes of Cranch which were both voyeuristic and strangely reminiscent of all my present day anorexic celebrities. Then there were those beautiful full figures of Ruben's, which thrilled me but disgusted many in my day simply because people could not believe people ever thought this voluptuousness attractive. Italian art was filled with elegant athletic and angelic female nudes, strapping virile male warriors. And in the last century the nude was dismembered by artists like Picasso and Bacon, coldly analyzed by Freud or sexualized by Schiele and Modigliani. 


Because the nude was so explosive, divisive not to mention technically difficult a subject - it was often avoided in the art of my day. This was a great pity. Because in a world glutted with fashion, glamour, soft-core and hardcore images of the body (mostly female bodies) art should have tried to intellectually and emotionally help us to understand our responses to these images. But art fled in terror. Sex and the nude might have sold everywhere else in the media world - but it did not sell in the art world. So what we had was a sea of images, which exploited our basic instincts of lust, vanity, narcissism, self-loathing, or inadequacy but which offered us no mental escape. Like Pavlovian dogs see responded to the triggers that advertisers and pornographers knew so well how to pull. Whether it was a young woman who thought she was fat, being made to hate herself even more because of the anorexic images of the fashion industry, or the young man being made to buy more and more porn because he was hooked on the high it produced - we were all in a way enslaved. I personally didn't think art was enslaving - I thought it was liberating and one of the greatest ways to find enlightenment. Which was why it was so shocking to see most art alienate us even more with abstractions and theories rather than real human stories and emotion.

Trip to the National Gallery of Ireland 2006

The following day I went to the National Gallery of Ireland with Carol. One of the great things about the National Gallery for me was that it was so familiar to me. I had visited it thousands of times, which meant that I could just go in to look at a half dozen paintings of my choice, without worrying that I was missing out on something. That day I saw some lovely English paintings by Hogarth, and Alfred Munnings (the arch Conservative painter of horses.) Munnings hated modern art, but he used the colorful pallet of the Impressionists, mixed with the tonal pallet of the academy. His painting of horses wading a stream was a beautiful fireworks display of colour especially in the colours of the water. Hogarth's portrait of a brother and sister was also beautifully painted in muted grays, and the under-pinning drawing was impeccable. The greatest thrill for me was to see a Modigliani reclining nude from 1917 - which was on loan. I loved Modigliani's paintings and the story of his brave life of bohemian decadence. Sadly, the recent film on his life that I had seen earlier in the year did not do him justice. Modigliani had talent to burn, and unfortunately he did indeed burn up a lot of his talent in drink, drugs, and passionate affairs with women. The nude on loan was beautifully painted in creamy rich thick opaque paint. In parts the under drawing could be detected - a loose but graceful line in thin black paint, over which he had scrubbed on a think creamy paste over the coarse grain of the canvas. The nude was painted in virtually one rich Orange/pink tone, and only subtle darker tones modelled the form. I loved this painting! It was scared on my mind!                                        

 Going around the National Gallery surrounded by such technically accomplished canvases, was both a joyful and humbling experience. It was joyful, because as a lover of art it was always a great pleasure to see works of such skill and beauty. But it was also humbling, because I realized just how far from this kind of technical genius I (or for that matter any modern painter) was. Modern art had many great qualities in which one could find pleasure. The main quality of modern art was originality. Artists of the modern age struggled to discover a style all of their own which could be recognized a mile off. Picasso, Warhol, Hirst all had their own styles, and it was their style that gave them a place in the art market. The technique was a secondary consideration, so that even if the work had technical sophistication and difficulty - it was only in the service of an idea of style - or artistic identity. But art before the late ninetieth century was first and foremost about technical skill of a supreme level. In the past an artist might only paint a dozen paintings a year, and sell them to a very local clientele. It was vital that every painting represent the artist at his very best, so many works were destroyed in case the public see the artists failures (for example Constable never showed his sketch's to the public, which was wise, as they might have thought him mad. Ironically though, in my day it was his sketches, which approached Impressionism that were most admired.) Where as in my day, art was a global business. The world was crammed with modern art museums and collections all of which wanted representative works by art stars - which led to over production and great variation in terms of the quality of works one saw.

However, there was really no point in expecting things to change. We could not go back to paint like Rembrandt, our society had changed, our training as artists had changed and the way art was consumed had changed. I thought artists like Odd Nurdum proved this point. Odd Nurdum would never be Rembrandt - he would always be a pasticheur. Rembrandt did not look back - he looked forward, he was as much of a modernist in his time as Picasso was in his. There was nothing stale in Rembrandt - his work was alive because he was of his time and yet ahead of it. Nurdum on the other hand was sickening. There was a gimpish quality to his work because there was something fundamentally incomplete in his personality. Something you could never say of Rembrandt who was one of the fullest and most complete recorders of humanity, history had ever seen. Thus the genius of Dalí was his ability to turn his old masterish technical command to new and modern subjects. Dalí was as skilled a painter technically as any in history, but by placing these skills in the service of modern surreal observations and fantasizes he avoided becoming a pasticheur. 


Before I left the National Gallery, I bought the letters of Delacroix. Delacroix's journals, which I had read constantly for years, were along with van Gogh's letters the most beautiful and thought provoking insights into the creative mind I have ever read so I had high hopes for his letters, but they turned out to be less pithy. I also got a great Taschen book on Impressionism, which was only €9 because it was part of the 25th anniversary of Taschen. How would I have survived without Taschen! I still remember the day before Taschen, when one was delighted to buy a book with only a half dozen colour photographs!